Researchers (kinda) achieve mind control

University of Washington researchers claim to have achieved the first human brain-to-brain interface.

So, you know, mind control.

According to an announcement made Tuesday, a researcher sent a signal into a colleague’s brain via the Internet and was able to move the other man’s hand.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent the signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of UW’s Seattle campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. According to the UW statement, researchers elsewhere have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between rats and between a human and a rat, but Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”

Researchers contend the technology could one day be used by someone on the ground to help a flight attendant or passenger land an airplane if the pilot becomes incapacitated, or to help people with disabilities communicate. The brain signals from one person to another would work even if they didn’t speak the same language.

The whole experiment was caught on video, available above.

Here’s how UW described the mind-bending experience:

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

“It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said. “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.”

Rao and Stocco next plan to conduct an experiment that would transmit more complex information from one brain to the other. If that works, they then will conduct the experiment on a larger pool of subjects.